


Keep Your Options Open

by backfire



Category: Veep (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode Tag, F/M, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-09
Updated: 2019-04-09
Packaged: 2020-01-07 05:26:49
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,329
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18404027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/backfire/pseuds/backfire
Summary: “Dan,” she says, looking at him head on and speaking clearly, “it’s not fucking happening.”





	Keep Your Options Open

**Author's Note:**

> Post episode 2x08 (First Response), leading into 2x09 (Running).
> 
> I wrote this purely because season 7 was giving me agita and I wanted to think about something else

When it becomes clear that Selina and Andrew aren’t coming back downstairs anytime soon, people start slowly dispersing. First to go is Catherine, who never returns after she stomps off in a huff. Then Mike, who mumbles something about taking the leftover chicken to his car. Jonah fucks off after Amy threatens to shove the limbless marble horse up his ass, and soon it’s just Amy, Dan, and the secret service detail left milling about. 

Frankly, she’s still fuming about the way Janet Ryland’s what’s-his-fuck garden gnome producer had spoken to her. The tension is radiating off of her, her shoulders hunched up near her ears and her arms crossed as she furiously glares into her phone. She’s fucking _good_ at her job, damnit. She is.

Dan is being Captain Obvious, posing his limbs overly casually as he leans against the banister and pretends to look at his phone, waiting for her to say something to him. She sees him giving her subtle glances and pointedly ignores them. Amy has no idea how he can think of himself as slick. 

There’s a muffled sort of groan that echoes from upstairs. Dan pointedly clears his throat. 

Amy loves her job. She’s good at it. It’s not humiliating.

A series of loud scrapes, like furniture is being moved around, followed by several loud thumps. 

She can see Dan open his mouth and for a second, she thinks about taking off without him—Lord knows she deserves some time to herself after today’s shitshow. But then she remembers the way he’d pulled her back, hand firm around the crook of her elbow, how he’d been the one to knock an iota of sense into Selina later on, which he probably wouldn’t have done if Amy hadn’t blown up.

“I’m outta here,” Amy says before Dan can get a word in, uncrossing her arms and hitching her bag over her shoulder. “I need a fucking drink.”

When Dan doesn’t immediately follow, she raises her brows at him and gives him a _well are you fucking coming or not?_ sort of look.

She doesn’t say a word the entire car ride there, not until they’re sitting side by side at the bar and Amy orders a double shot of whiskey, despite the fact that it’s only mid-afternoon on a Sunday. She’s purposefully picked a place close to her apartment so she can get as trashed as she wants without worrying about how to get home. Dan, who infuriatingly knows where she lives, seems to have noticed by the way his eyes scan perceptively along the street before they enter, but mercifully decides not to comment. He seems too pleased by the sequence of events to risk fucking it up and having Amy direct her fury towards him, evidenced by the crooked smirk dashed across his lips that he can’t seem to suppress the entire journey over. Amy wants to punch him.

“Ames,” he says as he slides into the stool next to her. Amy ignores him and orders him a double, too. “Maybe you should—”

“I swear to god,” she says, taking the cocktail napkin and crumpling it between her fingers, “if you tell me to _calm down_ or some shit like that—”

“Come on, I know you better than that,” Dan says. “I was going to say that maybe you should...think about what I said, earlier.”

“And what would that be?”

He’s quiet for a moment as their drinks arrive, looking at her with a calculated expression, like he’s trying to figure out how best to put his next words. “Maybe it’s time you looked at some other...options. There’s a lot out there, you know?”

“And what the _fuck_ is that supposed to mean?”

“You’re not blind, Ames. You can see it, everyone can, it’s right in front of our fucking noses. Selina barely managed to eke out a win today, pretty much thanks to me—”

“Oh, thanks to _you_ , huh?”

“Come the fuck on,” Dan says, and she’s partly angry because she knows it’s true. Dan could always do shit like that and get away with it—throw curve balls and speak like that to Selina and not get roasted alive, like she would. It enrages her. “Besides,” he adds, knocking back his drink and then giving her a pointed, heated look. He’s stupidly handsome, and Amy hates him all the more for it. “I didn’t do it for her.”

“You really think I’m going to believe that you did it for _me_ , you stupid fuck?” Amy says, narrowing her eyes.

“Fuck no,” he scoffs, a glint of humor in his eye. “I did it for me. Can’t have people think I’m jumping ship just because it’s on fire. Gotta be ahead of the curve.”

Amy’s insides plummet. She knocks her own drink back. “So you actually are leaving, then?”

Dan just shrugs. “It depends. Today ended up being good, so we’ll see where that takes us. Look, Ames, all I’m saying is that I’m keeping my options open, alright? And you should, too.”

“Can I not,” she says, “have one fucking afternoon where I don’t have to think about my career options and whether I’m backing the right horse or not?”

But Dan is right. Deep down, Amy knows he is—yes, she is the youngest chief of staff in the entire executive branch, but there’s also a reason why he’s made leaps and bounds working for lots of different people and—in the end they’d both ended up in the same office, working for the same person.

“Fine,” he replies, and orders them both another drink. “Fine, we can talk about something else. Like your massive, volcanic eruption, perhaps?”

“That _fuckface_ had it coming and you know it,” Amy says, latching onto the subject and grinding her teeth together. “I honestly would have hit him. I _honestly_ would have.”

“I know,” Dan smirks, seeming to enjoy her rage when it’s not directed at him. “You’re freakishly strong, you know that? For a second I didn’t think I’d be able to hold you back.”

Amy just purses her lips and swirls her drink in her glass.

“I kind of regret it actually,” Dan says, smiling crookedly at her and leaning back in his seat to loosen his tie. She knows that move—he’s made it on her before, but at this point, she’s too full of pent-up frustration to care. It’s just Dan, after all. She knows his brand of shit. “I would have liked to see that.”

“I bet you would’ve,” she mutters, and downs her second whiskey.

“I’m not gonna lie,” Dan goes on, looking her up and down, “it was kinda hot.”

Immediately, she turns towards him with her eyes narrowed. He’s leaning against the back of his bar stool, one arm stretched lazily over the wood while the other rests against the bar, limbs loose and eyes lidded. His stupidly arched eyebrows are cocked and his lips are curving into that lopsided signature smirk.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she asks, her guard up.

“Come on, Ames,” he says in that infuriating way of his, all slow and drawn out. “However much of a douchebag that guy was, he was right about one thing.”

It takes Amy a second before it clicks. The guy’s comment— _”if you’d just let someone get close enough to fuck some sunshine into you, you’d shut your mouth.”_

Dan, though, he knows what he’s doing—his literal job is thinking of the right things to say at exactly the right time, and he’s fucking good at it. Amy tries not to rise to the bait, tries to ignore the indignant rage that wells up inside her, pretending to be unaffected and turning loftily back towards the bar. “Whatever sunshine I need in me, I sure as shit don’t need it from _you_.”

“That’s where we disagree,” Dan says, leaning towards her now. Despite herself, Amy turns to look at him. In the dim light of the bar, his skin scattered with those stupid freckles and his eyes looking at her with heat and purpose, framed by those long lashes, he looks devastating—and he knows it.

“I’ve been watching you all day,” he continues. Amy feels something warm start to enter into the tension gathered around her, traitorous and slow. “I think you honestly need it more than I do.”

“You can’t go a single day without getting your dick wet, can you? This must count as some kind of handicap,” Amy sneers, rolling her eyes at him and trying not to notice the uncomfortable, hot static she’s starting to feel in her head and limbs.

“Think about it,” he insists. “I’d let you do whatever you want to me. You deserve it, after a day like today.” He sounds earnest.

“I’m—I’m still with Ed,” she says with a jolt, as if she’d only just remembered that fact herself. Which she _had_ , but she stomps down on that thought vigorously. Dan, though, is too damn perceptive for his own good and calls her out on it.

“You literally didn’t remember him until just now,” he says, smirking villainously. “That man-shaped stick insect doesn’t matter. You just proved it yourself.”

Amy, despite her best efforts, begins to imagine it—not necessarily sex with _Dan_ but just...releasing some of the tension that’s been building in her for weeks and weeks, pulled so taut that she thinks she’s going to snap any day now. And there’s the plus side that she would get to enjoy watching his stupid face be speechless for a while. (And she knows for a fact that he’s good at sex, but she doesn’t factor that part in. At all.)

“Dan,” she says, looking at him head on and speaking clearly, “it’s not fucking happening.”

—

So, Amy thinks as Dan pushes against her bedroom door and mouths a wet line down her throat, that had been a lie.

She really didn’t mean to. But the drinks had kept on coming and he kept on _looking_ at her like that and she kept on thinking about what it would be like—to just hold him down and wipe that fucking smirk off his lips. She’d stood without warning when she was just the side of drunk enough to make the stupid, very bad decision. This time, Amy didn’t have to give him a prompt for Dan to follow, close behind her and one hand on the small of her back. They didn’t even exchange any words about it, they both just _knew_ that it was going to happen.

And now it is happening; Dan’s stripping her of her jacket and pulling her shirt out from where it’s tucked into her skirt and dipping a hand in to feel her through her panties. She’s already wet, embarrassingly, and she can hear him chuckle against the skin of her neck.

“So all that ‘it’s not happening’ really was just talk, huh?” he murmurs, pressing a finger against her through the cotton. God, she can _hear_ his ego inflating. But Amy, single-minded and driven, just focuses on undoing his dumb Theory tie and getting his shirt off him. She doesn’t want to listen to him anymore after all his posturing in the bar, so she digs her the heels of her palms over her shoulders and shoves him until he falls back onto her bed.

“I want you,” she says, quickly kicking off her heels and stripping down til she’s naked, at record speed compared to all the other times she’s had sex with a guy, “to shut the fuck up. As I recall, you said you’d let me do whatever I want to you. So I’m telling you that what I _want_ is to not hear another _word_ from your idiot mouth.”

As Amy speaks, she divests him of his clothes with straightforward efficiency, too impatient to get on with it, too riled up to draw it out even longer. Amazingly, Dan obeys, leaning up on his elbows and looking at her with an almost reverential gleam in his eye. While she fishes a condom out from her bedside drawer and swings a leg over his hips to straddle him, Amy considers scooting upwards on the bed and covering his mouth with her slick cunt and riding his face. That would certainly be one way to make sure he stayed quiet. He would do it too, she knows he would.

But Amy has her mind set already, so she quickly tears open the condom, rolls it on him, and then sinks down onto him in one swift motion. To his credit, Dan still doesn’t say anything, but he does give a groan when she’s fully seated on his cock.

She rolls her hips, hot and mean, over Dan’s and makes a displeased sound when he raises his hands up to press them into her waist. She grabs his wrists, removes his hands from her body and leans forward so she’s pinning his hands above his head with her own, hovering over him and still grinding down onto him.

Her hair, hanging in a curtain around them, is brushing against Dan’s face and he looks at her with an intense, heated expression, his arms stretched above his head and his eyes staring into her own like he wants to devour her, though he makes no move to reverse their positions.

“You were that wound up, huh, Amy?” he says lowly, lips curling at the corners. She should have known he wouldn’t have stayed silent for long. “Need to hold me down and fuck me to get some sense of control back?”

“I thought I said to shut the fuck up,” she snarls. God, she hates his fucking mouth, hates the stupid fucking freckle on his stupid fucking lip. Dan just chuckles, low and breathy, right into her face, so she leans down and kisses him savagely so she doesn’t have to hear his stupid fucking voice.

She’s partly angry because he’s right—she’d _needed_ this. It feels so impossibly, fucking _good_ to be in this position, arms shaking with the strain of keeping herself upright as she pushes herself back onto Dan’s cock and moans into his mouth.

It’s not enough, so she rips herself away from his mouth and reaches one of her hands down to press against her clit. Predictably, Dan’s arm follows now that it’s no longer pinned. He wraps it around her waist, fingers pressing hotly against her lower back.

Amy’s panting into the side of his neck now, trying to hold back breathy moans as she seeks her own pleasure. Dan, now that is mouth is free, is whispering filthy things into her ear, how she’s so fucking sexy like this, all aggressive and dominant, how he wants her to come with his cock inside her, how he knew Ed could never do this for her.

“I’ve been thinking about this all fucking day,” he’s saying right into her ear, his voice low and strained as he rolls his hips upward, fucking into her. “Ever since you screamed in that guy’s face. You were so fucking hot.”

Amy wants to tell him to shut the fuck up again but then her orgasm hits her and instead she bites down on Dan’s neck and shudders as the wave crests and break. Her arm around Dan’s wrist gives out and she collapses on top of him, soft and boneless while he continues to fuck her through the aftershocks.

Dan’s groaning her name into her ear and holding her close, both arms wrapped around her waist now as he thrusts in a few more times before he comes, too. Amy’s too fucked-out to move, mind numb with static.

“Amy,” Dan grunts after a while when she hasn’t moved. Belatedly, she realizes she’s probably crushing him and rolls off him.

They’re both slick with sweat, and Amy scoots away from him as soon as she’s off him while he takes care of the soiled condom. She’s not uncomfortable, though, when Dan lays back on the bed with a soft grunt and the two of them continue to lay side by side in silence for the next few moments, catching their breaths. In fact, she feels _fantastic_ , her limbs relaxed for the first time in weeks, her mind too blissfully numb to remember to be stressed about eighty different things at once.

As soon as she hears Dan open his mouth to no doubt give some stupid, snide remark, at least forty of those things come rushing back.

“ _Don’t_ ,” she warns before he can get a word in. “I don’t want to hear it.”

“I was just going to say—”

“I said I _don’t want to fucking hear it_ , Dan,” she emphasizes.

She makes the mistake of turning her head to look over at him. He’s looking at her, something unreadable in his eyes.

“Okay, this was a mistake,” she says. “This isn’t happening again. Get out.”

“Sure,” Dan says agreeably, like he’s just humoring her, like he doesn’t really believe her. It’s infuriating. She turns away from him and throws a hand up over her eyes, feeling something start to burn up at her insides, beginning right in her sternum. Noticeably, it’s not regret—it’s something else, like a premonition, like the precipice of something bigger than just one drunken fuck between coworkers.

She feels him get out of the bed and gather his clothing from the floor and pointedly doesn’t look at him doing so.

“Ames,” he says when she finally gets out of the bed to put on a fresh pair of panties and a t-shirt. “Think about what I said, okay?”

“And what’s that?” she asks snidely, “‘ _You were so fucking hot when you screamed in that guy’s face?_ ’”

“Well, that too,” Dan smirks. “But come on. You know what I’m talking about.”

She does. It’s unsettling, how she hadn’t really _seen_ Selina’s flagging performance until Dan had shoved it into her face with that stupid pre-made graph of his. But the signs were all there once he pointed out the obvious, enough for even Amy to recognize them. And sure, Selina basically created her, plucked her out and promoted her from within faster than any person she’s ever worked for, but loyalty can only get you so far in politics. Amy knows a burning ship when she sees one.

“Get out,” she groans again. “If you stay in here any longer I’m going to need to get the place fumigated.”

Dan takes it in stride, throwing his things on. “Think about it,” he says at her bedroom door before he steps out.

— 

Amy does think about it. She thinks about it all the way through to the office the next day when she was to walk into the EEOB and listen to Selina preen about the interview and look at Dan like he hadn’t simultaneously given her the best sex she’s had in ages and shaken up her entire five year career plan.

She’s still thinking about it, in a more concrete, actionable sort of way when she catches Dan’s eye across the room at the Danny Chung speech later that day. She’s trying to figure out the political expediency Dan could possibly get out of convincing her, via his dick, to leave Selina _with him_ when he suggests they jump together, like Butch and Sundance. 

There’s no logical need for them to go together. Dan is perfectly happy turning tail on his own and seems to have been courting Danny Chung for some time. Amy’s been tied to Selina’s side for years, so what exactly is the benefit, aside from a one-off lay?

As they’re hurrying off to deal with the fact that Selina’s walked through a fucking glass door, Dan looks at her like he can see the wheels turning in her head and smirks.

Amy will never figure him out.

**Author's Note:**

> I think the Dan/Amy collective deserves to remember some of the early good times after how messy 7x02 was, don't you?


End file.
